St. Kitts Declaration is an Insight into Human Ecological Insanity - Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

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St. Kitts Declaration is an Insight into Human Ecological Insanity

 

Commentary by Captain Paul Watson

 

 

The first motion Japan has introduced in 20 years that has been passed by the

International Whaling Commission is bizarre and reflects just how out of touch

with ecological realities Japan and their puppet sycophantic nations are.

 

The motion passed by just one vote and that vote was cast by Denmark which now

has the distinction of casting the deciding vote that has strengthened the hand

of the whalers.

 

Fortunately the declaration was passed by a simple majority of one vote and did

not even get close to the required two-thirds majority needed to overturn the

global moratorium.

 

A look at the wording is revealing.

 

The declaration states that whaling is necessary for developing nations to

diversify their agriculture. In other words whales are being considered as

domestic crops to be harvested.

 

The only nations that are demanding the overturn of the global moratorium are

Japan, Norway and Iceland and these three nations can hardly be classified as

developing nations and certainly not poor nations.

 

The declaration then states that whales eat huge quantities of fish and

therefore are responsible for the world's dwindling resources of fish. The

declaration suggests that the IWC is being irresponsible in allowing these

whales to continue to eat all of the fish which Japan believes belongs to the

Japanese people.

 

According to the declaration, humanity having destroyed more than 90% of the

fish in the sea, are now blaming the whales for the demise of these same fish

and suggesting that the whales must be destroyed in the name of fish

conservation. This argument has not a shred of scientific validity and has been

constructed to serve the commercial self interests of Japan and Norway.

 

St. Kitts may have introduced the declaration, but St. Kitts is not an

independent nation. It is a country that has been economically invaded and has

surrendered its integrity and honour in exchange for paltry Japanese hand-outs.

 

The declaration then specifically targets anti-whaling groups as " threats " to

whaling and suggests that the IWC label these groups as unacceptable and

disallow their participation at IWC meetings. The declaration unabashedly states

that NGO's that oppose whaling have a self interested agenda that interferes

with the agenda of those who wish to profit from the killing of whales and

suggests that whaling is not motivated by self-interest. In other words if a

profit is to be made from killing whales than that is not a self-interested

position, and those who save whales without profit must therefore be acting in

self interest.

 

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not worried about this part of the

declaration. We have been banned from the IWC since 1986 because we confess that

we are indeed a threat to whaling. The declaration could hoever throw even the

moderate conservationists NGO's out of the meeting although pro-killing NGO's

like the High North Alliance would be allowed to stay because their condoning of

whaling is of course not motivated by self-interest.

 

The declaration states that the IWC should be " normalized " . This is the Newspeak

term for the resumption of whale killing. The Japanese argue that since the IWC

was set up to manage whaling that it obligated to promote whaling. Yet the

objectives of the IWC have been changed over the last three decades by the

participating member nations and the IWC has evolved from a whale killing to a

whale conservation organization. Japan finds this evolution to be unacceptable

and has chosen to negate this majority position by recruiting puppet nations

through bribery to force the IWC to turn the calendar back to before 1947 when

the IWC was pro-whaling. Japan would like to turn the calendar back on many

issues prior to 1946 when it failed to dominate and subjugate Asia through

brutality and violence. Today Japan is hoping to achieve through economic power

and bribery what it could not achieve through military thuggery.

 

Japan claims to be killing whales for scientific research yet they have not

produced any credible scientific papers to justify this bogus research. After

killing 17,000 whales the only research they have to show for it is marketing

and product development efforts. Japan also claims that they have not influenced

any nations to vote in their favor. Yet Guatemala arrived late at St. Kitts to

pay their IWC membership fee in Japanese Yen.

 

The fact is that the nations voting a straight yes to all of Japan's resolutions

have together received over $400 million in Japanese foreign aid packages

including tens of thousands of Japanese cars dumped cheaply or for free onto

Caribbean and Pacific islands. Thanks to Japan, St. Lucia has traffic jams and

every car is a Japanese model.

 

In short, Japan wants us to believe that whales must be killed before they eat

all the fish in the oceans so that poor developing nations can have a way to

diversify their " agriculture " by harvesting whales. This is an altruistic

approach unlike those selfish self-interested whale defending non-governmental

organizations who continue to embarrass Japan by pointing out their reams of

lies and their ridiculous cultural pride that motivates their extermination of

the world's whales and dolphins because no one is going to tell Japan what to

do.

 

What Japan needs is an economic equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb. Their last

insane lust for power and control ended in near suicidal horror as they

attempted to loot, plunder, slaughter and rape their way through Asia. Today

they are looting, plundering, slaughtering and raping their way through the

world's oceans. Instead of victimizing innocent Chinese citizens and raping

their mothers, they are massacring the world's innocent whales and dolphins and

systematically destroying entire populations of fish and invertebrates in their

commercial quest to feed an appetite based on a cultural preference for living

beings from the sea, preferably raw, exotic and rare.

 

The sheer audacity of it is mind-numbing. One hundred million sushi eating

Japanese have the gall to accuse the world's whales and dolphins of eating to

many fish. The nation that devolved racism into a cultural pillar of their

society where non-Japanese are considered inferior now have the effrontery to

accuse conservationists defending whales of being racist. This incredibly

wealthy nation has the arrogance to state that whales must be killed to appease

poverty by shipping the whale meat to the Tokyo fish market to be sold at high

prices to affluent Japanese citizens. In return Japan will toss a few used cars

onto remote islands and construct a fish plant or two to help locals plunder

more fish to send to Japan.

 

The St. Kitts Declaration is ecological insanity presented by a mindset that is

so ruthlessly resource exploitive in its priorities that all means are justified

to keep the madness of perpetual oceanic resource extraction continually active.

 

To say that whales are abundant is ridiculous. To say that whales are eating all

the world's fish is delusional. To say that the IWC can only be " normalized " by

a return to wholesale whale slaughter is sadistically sociopathic. Empathy for

the whales is dismissed as " emotional " .

 

Emotion is a human trait that is rejected only by totalitarian systems. To

dismiss emotion is to dismiss humanity's greatest virtue and it's only hope for

survival.

 

It is madness to reject emotion in favor of cold systematic utilitarian

exploitation. It is the same madness that sent the Nazi's on the march to horror

and self extermination and it is the same madness that screamed Banzai as

Japanese lopped off Australian heads and starved American and British soldiers

and civilians in Southeast Asia only a generation ago, a madness that was only

stopped by the madness of nuclear annihilation.

 

The St. Kitt's Declaration will go down in history as one of the most bizarre

and most incomprehensible attempts at a regulatory document ever devised.

 

The sad part is that the little Japanese island pawn nation of St. Kitts and

Nevis will shoulder the ridicule that future generations will heap upon it

because the name will implicate them for a document of ridiculousness authored

by the sushi samurai brigade under the leadership of Joji Morishita whose idea

of honour is to wallow like a power drunken psychopath in the hot spurting blood

of intelligent sentient creatures, as he prattles nonsense from a brain riddled

and addled from years of exposure to mercury.

 

We can only hope that when Morishita is drooling and staring into space from a

heavy-metaled assaulted swiss cheesed brain that he will have failed to ignite a

pogrom of slaughter upon whalekind.

 

The St. Kitt's Declaration is good for one thing. It has no effective power and

it reveals the utter ecological ignorance and arrogance of Japan and their

purchased rinky-dink finger puppet nations.

 

 

This commentary may be freely distributed and published.

 

 

Full Text of the St. Kitts Declaration

 

 

 

St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cote

d'Ivoire, Dominica, Gabon, Gambia, Grenada, Republic of Guinea,

Iceland, Japan, Kiribati, Mali, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Mauritania,

Mongolia, Morocco, Nauru, Nicaragua, Norway, Republic of

Palau, Russian Federation, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon

Islands, Suriname, Tog, Tuvalu.

 

EMPHASIZING that the use of cetaceans in many parts of the world including the

Caribbean, contributes to sustainable coastal communities,

sustainable livelihoods, food security and poverty reduction and that placing

the use of whales outside the context of the globally accepted

norm of science-based management and rule-making for emotional reasons would set

a bad precedent that risks our use of fisheries and other

renewable resources;

 

FURTHER EMPHASIZING that the use of marine resources as an integral part of

development options is critically important at this time for a number

of countries experiencing the need to diversify their agriculture;

 

UNDERSTANDING that the purpose of the 1946 International Convention for the

Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) is to " provide for the proper

conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of

the whaling industry " (quoted from the Preamble to the

Convention) and that the International Whaling Commission (IWC) is therefore

about managing whaling to ensure whale stocks are not

over-harvested rather than protecting all whales irrespective of their

abundance;

 

NOTING that in 1982 the IWC adopted a moratorium on commercial whaling

(paragraph 10e of the Schedule to the ICRW) without advice from the

Commission's Scientific Committee that such measure was required for

conservation purposes;

 

FURTHER NOTING that the moratorium which was clearly intended as a temporary

measure is no longer necessary, that the Commission adopted a

robust and risk-averse procedure (RMP) for calculating quotas for abundant

stocks of baleen whales in 1994 and that the IWC's own

Scientific Committee has agreed that many species and stocks of whales are

abundant and sustainable whaling is possible;

 

CONCERNED that after 14 years of discussion and negotiation, the IWC has failed

to complete and implement a management regime to regulate

commercial whaling.

 

ACCEPTING that scientific research has shown that whales consume huge quantities

of fish making the issue a matter of food security for

coastal nations and requiring that the issue of management of whale stocks must

be considered in a broader context of ecosystem management

since eco-system management has now become an international standard.

 

REJECTING as unacceptable that a number of international NGOs with self-interest

campaigns should use threats in an attempt to direct

government policy on matters of sovereign rights related to the use of resources

for food security and national development;

 

NOTING that the position of some members that are opposed to the resumption of

commercial whaling on a sustainable basis irrespective of

the status of whale stocks is contrary to the object and purpose of the

International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling;

 

UNDERSTANDING that the IWC can be saved from collapse only by implementing

conservation and management measures which will allow

controlled and sustainable whaling which would not mean a return to historic

over-harvesting and that continuing failure to do so serves

neither the interests of whale conservation nor management;

 

NOW THEREFORE:

 

COMMISSIONERS express their concern that the IWC has failed to meet its

obligations under the terms of the ICRW and, DECLARE our commitment to

normalizing the functions of the IWC based on the terms of the ICRW and other

relevant international law, respect for cultural diversity and traditions of

coastal peoples and the fundamental principles of sustainable use of resources,

and the need for science-based policy and rulemaking that are accepted as the

world standard for the management of marine resources.

 

 

 

 

Captain Paul Watson

Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977-

Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)

Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979) of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006) - The Farley Mowat Institute - www.harpseals.org - Ocean Outfall Group of California

Advisory Board Member - Telluride Mountain Film Festival

Advisory Board Member - The Animals Voice Magazine

 

Whom when I asked from what place he came,

And how he hight, himselfe he did ycleepe,

The Shepheard of the Ocean by Name,

And said he came far from

the main-sea deepe.

- Edmund Spenser

A.C.E. 1590

 

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